NPO News

The National Parent Organization (NPO), whose main mission is to promote shared parenting, has become bigger thorough the merging in of the mainly Florida focused Family Law Reform which now operates as NPO Florida.

In April of 2016, Florida Governor Rick Scott vetoed an alimony reform bill because he objected to a provision in the proposed legislation that would have required the court to presume shared parenting was in the best interest of the children.

Although I disagree with Governor Scott on shared parenting, I do believe it is a mistake to combine alimony reform with shared parenting legislation. The reality is that alimony itself is often the reason many couples fight over shared parenting in the first place. It is simply harder to argue you deserve alimony if you don't want primary custody of the children. The result is that children often become tools to maximize income for a parent that really does not want, or should not have, the responsibility. Mixing alimony reform and shared parenting just makes it all the harder to make progress as the Florida situation demonstrates. Take alimony out of the picture and battles over parenting become much less contentious. This clearly benefits children.

Although I ended up with joint custody of the kids, Spring fought it every step of the way. I have no doubt she would have readily agreed to joint custody, or even me having primary custody, if alimony was not in the picture. After all in practice we have both been quite content with me being the primary parent.

The Twisted Path to Justice

The fight for justice is never easy. Most people know that Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King had many setbacks. But lost to history are numerous average everyday people who often suffered horrendously and repeatedly by the actions of the perpetrators of injustice. I place myself and my children in this category.

On The Minnesota Alimony Reform site is a recently published story by a man who also contacted me. His story is a classic example of how far the villainous will go to tyrannize the innocent in order to protect their power and wealth.

The story, like so many others, will be viewed as unbelievable my many. The public unfortunately simply doesn't understand just how common and how real such stories are.

Here is a quick synopsis:

• The man's wife left him to live with her mother and her mother's boyfriend in another state. Their one child was left with the father. 
• Less than a week later the wife's mother moved out and she started living with her mother's now ex-boyfriend. This was four years ago. 
• In the divorce the man was required to pay his ex-wife over $21,000/year in alimony. 
• The man is now near the point where he cannot pay his bills. 
• After the Cohabitation Law was passed earlier this year in Minnesota, the man went back to court to eliminate or reduce alimony. His situation was a textbook example for why the law was passed. 

Here was the result in his words:

What happened was beyond the worst case scenario. Not only was my request to change to spousal maintenance denied but the judge actually INCREASED spousal maintenance and made the increase retroactive back seven months. The judge also is requiring me to pay her attorney’s fees in addition to my own attorney fees. And a surprising development: the judge demanded weekly phone calls between our son and his mother and overnight stays during visitations. While I myself have supported and pushed for this as well it concerned me because NEITHER ONE OF US ASKED FOR ANY CHANGES TO VISITATION IN OUR MOTIONS TO THE COURT.

People may be surprised by this but I am not. I'll admit this is one of the worst examples of injustice I have heard but my own story is similarly outrageous. And I have talked to far too many people that have stories nearly or just as bad. Examples include the newly married couple who were forced to increase alimony payments to an ex-spouse simple because they got married and the person who lost his job and was put in jail for his inability to pay alimony. These injustices, often constituting clearly criminal actions, are simply ignored by the court, the legal system and law enforcement. This is the reality.

Consumer Review Fairness Act & Lawyer Reviews

Congress has recently passed the Consumer Review Fairness Act which voids any provision in a form contract that prohibits or restricts customers from posting reviews about the goods, services, or conduct of the company providing the product or service.

When I first heard about the law I was excited because I thought it would protect people who wrote online reviews of lawyers. But unfortunately, I do not think that is the case. It would prohibit a lawyer from putting a clause in a contract that reviewing him or her online is prohibited but would not, as far as I can tell, make it any more difficult for a lawyer to sue for defamation.

Here is what happens if you say something negative about a lawyer online. First off it probably disappears in short order because lawyer will intimidate the site owner where the posting was made into removing it. This happens even if your posting was 100% truthful and backed up by facts.

Have you ever wondered why Angie's List has reviews for plumbers, electricians, mechanics and other services but not lawyers? They have made a conscious decision that it is not worth cost of dealing with all the lawsuits that would result. Oddly, there had been a bit of a backlash against this as some people will not sign up for Angie's List because they won't allow reviews of lawyers.

Here is the case of one poor woman who was told to pay $558,000 to a law firm because posted a one star review on Yelp. I don't think the court would award that amount or any amount of money if she gave a one star review to a restaurant, do you? Unfortunately the legal system is able to get away with actions, often criminal actions, that the public is not. Classic corruption.

Arvo.com, a site that explicitly allows you to review lawyers, simply removes bad reviews. I know, I posted one on Nelly Wince and it went away. Presumably because she had it taken down. Nice review system.

If you are say hosting your own site then the lawyer or law firm will intimidate you directly.  They likely will file a defamation suit even if you are clearly within your rights in making the posting. The merits of suite do not matter a whit. The point is to use the legal system to make you spend money and time in defending yourself. It is to ruin you financially.  It is to subdue you. This was pretty much Nelly Wince's tactic during Spring's divorce suite against me. Lawyers, at least the bad ones, are really good at using the law to harm the innocent. And there is precious little anyone can do to stop them.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that many states, including Minnesota, have SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) designed to prevent just this. But unfortunately they do not work well when the abusive party is a lawyer. As I say, classic corruption.

More Discoruagement

I can't seem to get a break. I received a call from the Minnesota Judiciary on a request I make a few months back for statistics on permanent alimony or spousal support as it is known in the state. I was informed there that no data available on how often alimony let alone permanent alimony is awarded. I had hoped to get statistics on permanent alimony by county because there is a widespread belief among lawyers and legislators that permanent alimony orders vary widely by county. One state senator said that if I could get statistics showing that, it would be helpful in making the case for alimony reform.










I have often heard and read that permanent alimony in Minnesota is rare. Unfortunately no one really knows as the data simply does not exist on how often any type of alimony is ordered by the court. I would say unbelievable but given my experience it is par for the course.

Discouraged

I am discouraged.

The Minnesota Supreme Count denied my motion to change the Lawyers Rules of Professional Conduct to include:

The investigator assigned, if a lawyer, shall not be in active practice in the same area of law that the lawyer under investigation practices in. The investigator assigned, if not a lawyer, shall not be a person who works in a profession which commonly receives referrals from lawyers who practice in the same area of law as the lawyer under investigation. 

As I wrote about before, The Lawyers Professional Responsibility Board recommended that my petition be denied.  They said there was no need for it. Which is laughable given the evidence in my complaint against Nelly Wince. Wince so clearly violated the ethical rules and committed criminal fraud that I do not think it is even theoretically possible to have better evidence against her. Yet it was all ignored. Occasionally, lawyers and judges will tell me that the issues I have with Family Law need to be addressed by the legislature. But when they so blatantly ignore current law, what good would better laws have?

I am discouraged.

Spring divorced me. The custody evaluator ruled that she was not the primary parent. A vocational evaluation determined she could make just as much money as me. The children spend far more time with me than Spring and I pay everything for them - both of whom are now in college. Spring committed perjury and her lawyer Nelly Wince clearly committed criminal fraud and fraud upon the court.

I host all the holidays. I don't discourage the boys from seeing their mother but they have gotten in the habit of limiting their time with her. This Thanksgiving they spent one night out of five at her place.

Yet, Spring managed to take most the assets at the time of the divorce and I have to pay her in excess of $30,000 per year until he day I die. The amount actually grows every two years automatically. I can never retire. I can never remarry as that would allow Spring to seek an increase in alimony and would obligate my new wife to pay alimony to Spring should I lose my job or become disabled.  

I am discouraged.

I have a job that I work at every day. I just got off a two month period where I worked an incredible amount of hours, much of it on the road. I do not dislike my job but the fact that the benefit of it goes almost entirely to reward Spring and her lawyer for criminal actions is not exactly motivating. If I lost my job the likely scenario is that I would go to court to reduce alimony and be told to come back when I have no money, Then when I went back after having transferred my remaining assets to Spring I would be told to come back when I have maximized the debt on my credit cards. Then after I had done that, I would be thrown in jail. You may think that would never happen but that is the way the system works. The responsible and honest are financially raped, repeatedly raped, by the criminals.

I am discouraged.

The threads of hope are slipping through my fingers.

MoveOn.org Petition to Reform Alimony

Catherine Conlin has created a MoveOn.org petition to reform alimony in California.

Specifically Conlin seeks to:

Remove unlimited jurisdiction by the California Family Law courts over long term Marriages with no children. One spouse should not be eternally responsible for the other once a divorce is final. End family law jurisdiction at 5 years, no matter the length of the marriage.

The petition has been signed by hundreds of people. Many have included comments about injustices in the Family Law Courts.

Alimony Is Bad For Women And Based On Flawed Logic

Emma Johnson on www.wealthysinglemommy.com says that Alimony is bad for women and based on flawed logic. I could not agree more. Many of her arguments are ones that I have also made. In most cases alimony degrades women because it implicitly treats them as less able than men. 

Suffragists and feminists before us fought bitterly (and joyously, one would hope) so you and I have financial and legal parity with men. We have a way to go, but for the most part in this country women have opportunity to support themselves. With opportunity comes responsibility. You choose to be financially dependent on someone else (like a husband), you take a risk. If that marriage ends and you have little career equity and low earning potential as a result, you must pay the consequences of the downside of that risk.

Take alimony out of the career-planning equation and we force women to take full responsibility for their careers and finances from the beginning of adulthood. This is critical if we are going to close the pay gap, which has little to do with workplace sexism, and more to do with women choosing lower-paying professions and stepping away from careers to devote to family life.